June 2008 Archives

Last week's ICANN meeting proved to be incredibly busy, both in terms of number of attendees and the number of announcements made.

From our point of view there were a number of topics that are relevant and important to our business and I'll be posting about some of these in the coming weeks both here and on my personal domain blog.

Last Thursday morning I was on the panel for a workshop on IPv6. There were four of us on the panel talking about our experiences from very different angles. If nothing else I definitely feel that I learnt something from it.

Of course the big announcement of the week was in relation to new Gtlds. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to have cherrypicked from the announcements and now seem to think that all sorts of crazy domain extensions will now be available. They won't. (I'll follow up on this over the next few days).

As John mentioned on his blog, ICANN have finally taken steps to mitigate "domain tasting". It won't stop it outright, but it should curtail it quite a bit. It will also have the handy side-effect of stopping Network Solutions' practice of "holding" domains for "clients", as they won't be able to do it without incurring a fee.

The Afilias team were at ICANN Paris in full force and held a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of dotme (Montenegro).

Closer to home (relatively speaking), Telnic announced their launch timeline. They've also started rolling out demo applications so that both users and developers can get a "feel" for the things you can do with a dottel domain (.tel).

The next few months should be an interesting time for the domain industry!

ICANN's 32nd International public meeting opened in Paris yesterday morning.

There are several hot topics on the agenda and judging by the crowds of people at last night's welcome cocktail, attendance levels are good.

If you're interested in finding out more head over to the meeting's official site where you can find details of meetings, talks, presentations and more.

The areas that are bound to attract attention this week are quite diverse and encompass topics such as new TLDs, the launch of .tel (dottel), Whois (again!), registry failover, the registrar agreement and both IDNs and IPv6. (Can you say "acronym hell"??)

Of course no ICANN meeting would be complete without an equally busy social agenda and last night's welcome cocktail at La Defense (photo above) was no different. Wednesday's gala dinner is being held in yet another famous Parisian landmark (more on that Thursday I hope!)

Image via Wikipedia

Blacknight, Microsoft and PollDaddy provided prizes, with us offering a year's VPS hosting to the winner!

We'll be liasing with Alan to ensure he gets to make full use of his prize :)

We've been toying with the idea of providing "live chat" on our site for quite some time.

We finally found a software vendor whose product fit our criteria, so we're now offering live chat on our VPS hosting site.

All conversations are routed over 128 bit SSL, so your privacy is assured.

We would, of course, ask that people not handover credit card details etc., via the live chat system.

Staff from sales, technical support and accounts are available from 8 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday to answer your queries.

Of course if anyone has any feedback to give us either here or via email (management@blacknight.com) we'd love to hear it.

Image via Wikipedia

Thursday evening sees the Firefox party in Dublin, which is sponsored by ourselves, PutPlace, Wubud and BT.

If you're in Paris this week there's a domainer meeting being held prior to the ICANN meeting. It looks like quite a few people will be attending both events, as they are in the same venue.

Saturday is BarCamp Belfast.

And of course there's ICANN in Paris which officially starts the following Monday.

Ok the title sounds a bit funny, but it's the best I could come up with. Calling all developers, ROR users and people who need and want flexible ruby on rails hosting.

What is your ideal server setup? There are many choices, here are the ones we'd consider.

1) Apache + FastCGI?
2) Apache + Mod_Proxy with Mongrel or another application server?
3) Apache + mod_rails (passenger)

Shell access won't be a possibility here unfortunately in our new shared hosting system, it's just not going to be a feature. So what would people like instead? A ruby console of some kind that has limited command line options? What would you like these to be? access to ruby, rake etc?

What about Gems, have the ability to install your own gems? (I can't see this happening) How about if we had a Gem request system where by you can click a button and stick in a gem name and our support team would get notified?

Many people often ask how do I restart my application? Our current Apache/FastCGI setup results in this question a lot. This requires an apache restart which in cases of busy loads can take the server offline for anything from 2-30 seconds, admittedly this isn't ideal at all. In an ideal world we'd use passenger (mod_rails). All you have to do to restart your application is put a file called "restart.txt" into the tmp folder of your application and passenger restarts your app, cool huh?

What else would you like? What options would be ideal?

We're delighted to be involved in some little way with the next BarCamp event which is being held on Saturday, June 21st 2008 in Queen's University.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend, as I will be in Paris for the ICANN meeting.

If you're interested in finding out more or would like to simply drop by you can find all the details over on the BarCamp site.

The list of attendees is growing nicely, so it should be an enjoyable and informative day for anyone interested in technology.

Image via Wikipedia

I will be heading over to the ICANN meeting in Paris next week. At present ICANN holds international meetings three times a year and it's a very good opportunity to get involved with the discussions of policy and future development of the internet.

While I am looking forward to the trip, I'm also quite nervous, as I have been asked to give a presentation on IPv6 to a group of industry peers.

Here at Blacknight, as we keep telling people, we've been investing heavily in network equipment. In simple terms we've been doing our utmost to ensure that not only do you never have to suffer the pain of an outage, but also to make sure that any sites or servers hosted by us have excellent connectivity to the outside world.

One of the areas that is of concern to a lot of people in our industry is the depletion of ipv4 space.

(I can practically hear people yawning at this point!)

Basically any device, be that a pc, phone, tablet or whatever that wants to connect to the internet needs an IP address. Back when Vint Cerf et al were coming up with the internet they had no way of knowing how big it would grow or how their addressing system would be expected to cater for so many users for such a long time. The end result - the current system of allocating IP addresses means there is a finite number of them available and that number is getting smaller every single day.

Our CTO Paul posted about our plans to bring IPv6 to everyone last year.

Of course it hasn't happened yet, but we weren't expecting it to happen overnight.

As I mentioned in a recent interview with ENN, it's a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation.

With that in mind we've been working on rolling out ipv6 to as many areas as possible.

Some of our company sites are accessible over IPv6, such as www.blacknight.ie - but not www.blacknight.com, as we're waiting to upgrade some backend software to support the necessary DNS records. I'm a strong believer in "eating my own dog food", so I've enabled IPv6 on my personal servers so that you can now access several blogs and other sites over ipv6 or ipv4.

We're also in the process of enabling IPv6 on our nameservers, so that not only would we be able to server AAAA (ipv6) records, but the nameservers themselves will be accessible over IPv6.

Unfortunately not all hosting providers and ISPs are offering native IPv6 on their networks, so we have to do some jiggery pokery to get it all working on our partner networks (we run dns in three countries for extra redundancy)

We're doing some maintenance on our billing system this evening from around 8pm (Irish time) to around 9pm.

During this period the following services will NOT be available via the main Blacknight website:

• New orders - hosting & domains - this does not have any impact on VPS hosting
• Payments
• Viewing / editing account details

The maintenance will have zero impact on hosting accounts and has not impact on our new VPS hosting solutions, as they use a completely different billing backend

More details on the technical status blog

Image via Wikipedia

Later this month Firefox v 3 will be launched (it's currently in advanced beta testing) and it will be time to celebrate.

The good people at Mozilla are organising parties at a number of locations worldwide and the Dublin event is being organised by Paul from Segala and being sponsored by us and Putplace.

The event happens to coincide with the Irish Open Source Technology Conference, so there should be a number of OSS people in the Dublin area anyway...